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| EMILY KIRSCH | I'm Emily Kirsch, Founder and CEO of Powerhouse. This is Watt It Takes, a show about the entrepreneurs making our zero-carbon future a reality.
What will it take to quickly phase out fossil fuels from the electricity system? We'll need to build an unprecedented amount of wind, solar, and other clean power plants, but renewables alone won't be enough. We'll also need energy storage that allows us to use this energy anytime we want it. There's a race going on to build the next generation of storage technologies, using gravity chemicals, or heat to store clean electricity for long periods of time.
And that's where our guest Ramya Swaminathan comes in.
Ramya is the CEO of a company called Malta. Malta is building an electrochemical battery that converts renewable electricity into heat. That heat is stored in molten salt, and then converted back into electricity when it's needed on the grid. It's like a giant version of the heat pump in your air conditioner using commercially available off the shelf parts.
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| RAMYA SWAMINATHAN | Energy storage at its most basic level is really about taking energy from a time where its marginal value is low and moving it to a time where its marginal value is high. We do this, we using batteries, for example in our mobile phones all the time. So when we're home and near the outlet, we plug in our phones, the marginal value of one additional electron at that time is pretty low. So we take it, we charge our phones, load up the batteries, and then later when you're out and about the marginal value is very high of that electron because otherwise you would not be able to run your phone. So at its most basic level, all energy storage does that, and Malta certainly does. Most of the storage systems being added to the grid today are lithium-ion batteries, literally a much bigger version of the technology that powers your phone, but those batteries operate for a relatively short amount of time, often four to six hours. Malta's heat pump battery could last for half a day and potentially multiple days.
So very large utility scale systems, a hundred megawatts, 10 hours, and our likely customers are really utilities that are shutting down coal facilities, et cetera. So big, you know, big industrial power plant size is what you're imagining.
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| EMILY | In 2018 Malta was spun out of X, the moonshot factory established by Google's parent company. Since then, Malta has raised more than $76 million to commercialize its storage system. Its investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a firm started by Bill Gates, Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook founder and Alfa Laval, a Swedish company that makes heating and cooling equipment for heavy industry. Malta aims to have power plant sized facilities serving the grid by 2024.
Ramya was brought into the company as CEO in 2018 to help make those large storage projects a reality. She was a natural fit. Before Malta, she co-founded and ran a hydropower company. Before that she was an investment banker. So she understands how to fund and build difficult energy infrastructure. And the importance of that infrastructure was ingrained in her at an early age. Ramya was born in India. She later moved to the Philippines and in high school in the mid 1980s, she watched Filipinos rise up against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
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| RAMYA | So really revolutionary, inspiring moment in history. However, the years after that were tumultuous, chaotic, and a difficult time for the whole country.
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| EMILY | In the aftermath of that chaotic political moment, energy supplies were tight, and suddenly Ramya's life was dictated by the availability or the absence of electricity.
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| RAMYA | So we had, you know, every day, for many of the years after that interrupted power supply, sometimes on schedule, sometimes not. And we would just collectively all learn to create our schedules around that. So if you knew that you weren't going to have electricity at certain times of day, you would know that you needed to do homework. And the point I wanted to make about that, and the one that continues to resonate with me today is that I'm sitting here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I think it's easy to think of the electrified world, and then our image of the unelectrified world, I think is remote, off grid, rural, poor, et cetera. And that's actually not fully inclusive of the reality of vast swaths of the world who are urban, middle-class, certainly poor, but also middle-class and upper-middle-class who don't enjoy reliable electricity supply, and that's a big part of what we collectively all of us engaged in the work of the energy transition have to do, which is to assure that that supply going forward.
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| EMILY | Malta's mission is to make that supply continuous, clean, and reliable by deploying energy storage at scale. After living in the Philippines, Romio moved to the US. She went on to study anthropology at Amherst and got a Master's in public policy at Harvard. But rather than go into academia or government, she went into investment banking where she financed public infrastructure, roads, bridges, transportation systems. That eventually brought her to energy, and guides how she operates as the CEO of a startup trying to scale a new kind of thermal storage plant. I talked with Ramya about her path, her purpose, and the promise of storage.
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| RAMYA | I've always been interested in the intersection of policy, government and private enterprise. And if you want to think about it, most specifically in the investment banking years, it was really about capital formation, which is of course also just core to a clean tech CEO's existence day in, day out, you're thinking about capital formation. So, in a certain sense when you, when I look back today at the career trajectory that I've taken, in some ways, it seems very disjointed, right? Because I studied one thing, I then went on to be an investment banker, I co-founded a company and then have been in the clean tech world ever since.
On the other hand, in many ways, the arc of it is really uninterrupted in that it's always, it was always dealing with the intersection of policy, capital markets, capital formation. And what I found really interesting about investment banking at that time was that I, I worked in the, the public finance markets. So it was really about helping governments finance their projects, largely infrastructure projects, that was really focused on what I found most meaningful at that time in that world, which was really about helping governments finance infrastructure using capital markets to assure the public good.
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| EMILY | I know you were in investment banking in 2008 when the financial crisis unfolded and it was obviously a catastrophic moment for many companies, but it actually in a kind of odd way, opened the door for your entrepreneurial journey. How did that moment change your trajectory?
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| RAMYA | To be completely honest, I don't know if I would have really had the courage to intentionally step into an entrepreneurial kind of position and help co-found a company. Uh, except exactly as you said, in 2008, I was in investment banking in late 2007. And if you were in financial services at the time, I think generally it felt like the world was ending. And so exactly as you suggested in the closure of what had been the path for the previous more-than-decade was also the kind of open-eyed imagination of, well, if I'm not doing that, what else am I doing? And the courage part of it really came from the fact that I had the opportunity to join two very close colleagues that I'd worked with for a long time, had a lot of confidence, with a deep friendship with, join them in creating a new venture.
And the reason I said that I don't think I would have had the courage to do it by myself, was in that context, the opportunity to do that with people that I felt very connected to and meaningfully supported by was a big part of taking that step for me.
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| EMILY | Tell me a little bit about the company you and your colleagues created. I know it was called or is called Rye Development, it's a hydropower company, tell me about Rye Development.
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| RAMYA | Rye Development was a ton of fun. So when we left and when we started, it was actually called Free Flow Power, that was the predecessor company, and we started as a hydrokinetic development company. And when I say hydrokinetics, what I mean is the generation of power from moving water, but no damming, no impoundment. So we were looking really at the riverine environment of the lower Mississippi river, which, you know, drains 40% of the north American continent, and we had an RND arm that was developing a turbine generator specifically designed for this application, which is ultimately an exercise in harvesting small amounts of power, over large amounts of areas, so you need lots of turbines to generate power.
And I think particularly in the wake of Katrina, hurricane Katrina in 2005, there was a lot of excitement in the lower Mississippi region for energy security, energy independence, resiliency, et cetera. And so we really felt like we were on a mission to create not only green power, but also to offer these virtues of, you know, energy, independence, security, reliability, particularly for remote areas, you know, right along alongside the river.
In many ways, it was a very difficult fundraising environment, as you can imagine in the context of the financial crisis, but perhaps even more difficult, ultimately, to deal with for that business was the gas, the gas crash, you know, with gas prices going as low as they did with electricity prices in that region going as low as they did, the alternative, the need to find alternatives to gas, really sort of evaporated from a fundamental economic analysis point.
But in the process of doing that, what we had also discovered was that the opportunity set in hydro in the United States was enormous. And the headline number is really kind of shocking. There are 79,000 dams in the US and only 3% of them have power. So there was this enormous opportunity to put hydro on existing dams. So no new dams, no new impoundments. So from an environmental perspective, extremely benign. And we were actually successful in getting a lot of large environmental groups to agree with the prospect of creating green energy from an extremely benign application of hydropower.
Traditionally, if you know anything about hydropower, there definitely has been some controversy about the environmental impacts of creating new dams and new impoundments. And so that opportunity set was large, we were able to land our first round of institutional funding in 2010 with US renewables group leading around into that company.
So moved away, there was a pivot away, from the original hydrokinetics focus to conventional hydro, run of the river hydro, and existing dams. And by 2015 Free Flow Power by that time had morphed into Rye Development for a variety of reasons. The management team left and created a new entity called Rye Development had by 2015, we had also discovered and really felt enthusiastic about the prospect of pumped hydro storage.
And so it had expanded the mandate from just conventional run of the river hydro to pumped hydro storage. And we're pursuing a few, very large projects in the Pacific Northwest, which are actually doing really well even today. Those projects are ongoing and Rye Development is ongoing and doing very well, which I'm very appreciative for.
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| EMILY | What did you learn from hydro development that informed your current work in storage?
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| RAMYA | I learned a lot and a direct kind of analog to what I'm doing today is really on the business side of storage. And one of the things that you know was true for pumped hydro storage remains true for the kind of storage that we at Malta do today is that the market mechanisms that fully value all the different values that long duration storage brings to the market have not been fully developed, not only here in the United States, but hardly anywhere in the world. So it's a developing market. But certainly during that time, sort of, I was able to see very directly the benefits of pumped hydro storage.
That's a very linear answer to your question. Like, you know, what did I learn about storage? Well, I learned about storage, specifically storage markets, storage technology, the need for competition, the idea of scale and the need for scale, the market barriers to scale, et cetera. But in a larger sense, you know, so many of the things that one learns when founding a company, running a company and dealing with the challenges of all kinds of things, pivots, you know, capital raising, et cetera, are lessons that you take with you. And they are very fungible to future endeavors. And so in that, in that larger sense of the word, I feel like practically everything I learned, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly, informs who I am today.
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| EMILY | And another conversation, something that you said that I loved was your experience leading Rye Development, gave you an understanding of the power of childhood naivete. What did you mean by that?
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| RAMYA | What I meant by that was, you know, I referred to it obliquely earlier today, which is, I'm not sure I would have had the courage to start a company. Had I not been accompanied by, you know, a number of people that I already felt very connected to and that's the context in which I don't think I had a deep appreciation for what it meant to found a company, lead a company, you know, have absolutely no scaffolding starting with, you know, payroll, processing payroll, to speak to the most, you know, kind of, lowest level of what, you know, your team expects from you, which is to get paid on some kind of cycle, to say nothing of the deeper obligations and stress of carrying the weight of, to go back to the same point, of the carrying, the weight of making payroll. You know, when your reserves, when your capital reserves run low and your runway is running short, to feel the weight of that responsibility that, oh my God, how am I going to make payroll?
You know, not just next week, but two weeks after that, and then two weeks after that, you know, et cetera, I knew nothing of how any of that felt, and I have to confess that if I did, you know, that might itself have been an insurmountable barrier. You know, you, when you're in it, you put one foot in front of the other and you deal.
And you're carried along by the mission, and the sense that what you're doing is self-evidently important and you've made that commitment to yourself you know, that we're working, we get up every day in service of a mission. And, you know, we've recommitted to that mission by waking up that day and going to work.
And so that's what I mean, which is, you know, the naivete of sort of thinking, well, if the mission is strong enough and if I feel connected enough, well, it's all gonna work itself out. Um, was what I meant by sort of thinking along the lines of a childhood sense of a story that naturally comes to a happy ending.
And we all know when we're in it, that even if you do come to a happy ending, that there are times when the feeling of it is very fragile internally, right, and the feeling of it does not feel for certain that you're going to get to that happy ending.
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| EMILY | In 2018, Ramya left her position at Rye Development to lead Malta's commercialization. So what convinced her to depart the company that she had co-created? Malta's technology story gripped her, and there were a lot of similarities to building hydropower.
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| RAMYA | So the original idea for the technology was conceived by a professor at Stanford, a physicist named Robert Laughlin, and his original brilliant technical insight was that you could take, you know, subsystems that are well established that are known and exist today in a very robust ecosystem of design and manufacturing and operation within power plants. So a heat pump on the charge side, a heat engine on the generation side, and a thermal energy storage in the middle, in the form of molten salt on the hot side and a commodity antifreeze fluid on the cold side.
And if you integrated that, what you would get, all those subsystems, which you would get would be low cost, long duration, grid scale, energy storage. And he was way ahead of the market, he had this, you know, idea and thought in the 2010 timeframe and ultimately ended up selling the idea and his company to Google, who took it into X, the moonshot factory, de-risked it, put it through, you know, the ringer, in terms of all the tests that they do for failure in terms of techno-economic analysis, pure technical development scoping, on the risk side, commercial diligence, and by 2018 had firmly established that Malta was an idea that refused to fail.
And so they decided they were gonna graduate the project and establish it as an independent company. And when they looked for a CEO at that time, I was by that time, the CEO of Rye Development, we were obviously doing conventional hydro, but we were also doing pumped hydro storage. So, in that sense, I made perfect sense to lead the, the spin-out.
So I left Ride Development, and worked with the folks at X to create a business plan and put a syndicate together. And in late 2018, we were successful in spinning it out as an independent company. And the first time I heard about the idea, my thought was, gosh, this is pumped hydro storage without the hydro.
But of course there was a lot more to that than just, you know, the simplicity. Although I was drawn by it of feeling like the Malta technology had all the best parts of what I really felt so energized by, in pursuing pumped hydro storage, but really had a way of getting around the limitations, particularly those inciting and scaling.
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| EMILY | What was it like joining a startup that, that did have this history before you came in as CEO?
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| RAMYA | It was very interesting, you know, as the sort of, part of the founding team and, you know, in a company you normally kind of know everything about it, you know, and that was not me at all. In the case of Malta, there were many people who we're still lucky to have advising us in one capacity or another, who knew so much more about Malta than I did, who knew more about the technology, who knew more about the commercial prospects, who knew more about the history of what had been tried and what hadn't. I think it gave me a lot of scaffolding and support to draw a picture of what I imagined the company could be and how it could be successful.
But, had the resources of all these really bright people who had spent years thinking about many of the same questions and potentially had different ideas than I did. And so I was able to really help the maturity of the company and the ideas that I was bringing to the table, test themselves out, in the context of folks who, who knew a lot about the technology. And so in that sense, I think it was really a real blessing to the company that that was the case.
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| EMILY | I know you are not an engineer by training, but you are leading a highly engineering focused company. I know for myself also not having an engineering background, not being a technical person myself, sometimes I feel insecure about that. I question my leadership being in this industry as a result. Are those doubts or questions you ever had? What is it like leading this highly engineering company, given that, that isn't your background, but it's clearly your skillset because you've done it before and you're doing it again.
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| RAMYA | Yeah, of course. And that was true at Rye Development and its predecessor as well. What I realized is that in some ways, of course, as long as you do the work to understand with respect, that in some ways it's actually a strength to not be an engineer leading an engineering effort, and it frees you from having to believe received wisdom.
It frees you from not being able to ask questions that otherwise might be considered basic or stupid even. And it frees you from having to imagine things in exactly the way they've been imagined before. And so, you know, everyone I've worked with engineers particularly are very used to my saying, well, you know, I don't really know, but why blank?
Like why does it have to be designed this way? Why is this a trade-off, you know, specifically with that thing, why can't we have both, why can't we do something in a completely different way than it's been done before? I think, again, as long as it's accompanied by a deep amount of willingness to kind of do the work and get to understand the basics, I think that can actually present as a strength. And over time, I've really been able to work very closely with all the engineering groups I've ever led with a healthy amount of respect on both sides.
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| EMILY | Hmm. I love that. That was- thank you. That's really beautiful to hear. You mentioned pulling together a syndicate to then spin Malta out of X. What was that fundraising process like?
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| RAMYA | Yeah, it took about five months. And core for me, as I kind of came into Malta was recognizing, I think, the brilliance of the original design and the original idea. And it was this, it was that a lot of the subsystems did not have to be reinvented. There were folks in the world who knew them, understood them, lived in, lived day in day out in the world of designing, manufacturing, shipping on ultimately operating, maintaining these subsystems. A large part of when I say a syndicate, it was really about understanding that the core strength of the multi technology is that by design, there was relatively little R and a lot of D and bringing to the table folks globally best in class companies that could work with us as investors, partners, fully aligned in bringing their expertise to the table.
And as it happened, you know, all of this was happening and this has only intensified, it was happening against the backdrop of what we now understand to be kind of a secular decline in traditional fossil industries, right? Yeah, oil and gas. And so there is a, I think a great untapped potential to really bring to the table.
Folks who have the expertise, because a lot of our core subsystems really look like traditional fossil assets, subsystems, turbo machinery, heat exchangers. The balance of plant looks very much like a traditional fossil fuel plant, bring to the table folks who have that expertise and who might otherwise be displaced in the world that is transitioning away from those assets.
And so the syndicate we put together, not only in our series A but also in our series B has reflected really that idea that we are, you know, going to get to market fast if we have folks at the table already with the global world-class expertise and are fully aligned with the company and getting there and as well, I think the resonance across the board is really about the energy transition is, is a big tent and it really is going to succeed because everybody is at the table.
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| EMILY | I know the series B am I right, that it was 50 million? Is that, was that the recent series B and then the A was-
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| RAMYA | About 26.
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| EMILY | 26. And that's the capital that's been raised to date. Any notable investors that you want to point out that bring that strategic alignment that you talked about?
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| RAMYA | Yeah, so we've been lucky enough to be able to sort of have pure financial investors. Although, I would say they're extremely sophisticated financial investors who have a lot of expertise in these kinds of industries. So Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is Bill Gate's climate fund, Dustin Moskovitz participated in our series B and he's one of the founders of Facebook. And then on the strategic side, we've been lucky enough to also attract a lot of strategics.
So Alfa Laval, which is a Swedish company, one of the world's largest manufacturers of heat exchangers is an investor in Malta, invested both in our series A and B, and they're also our joint development partner for the heat exchangers that are being custom developed for this application to kind of optimize cost and performance and Proman, which is a vertically integrated petrochemicals company based in Switzerland, led our series B and they have an in-house EPC capability to design and deliver projects.
So we've been lucky enough to kind of get both sides of the aisle, to the table, both in terms of financial investors and strategic investors who sometimes have, you know, slightly dissimilar reasons for investing. But nevertheless, I think are very mission driven at the moment to invest in clean tech.
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| EMILY | What were the best and worst parts of fundraising, both in the A and the B?
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| RAMYA | The best part of fundraising really, I think, is being, having the liberty to do so in this environment. So that, you know, and certainly looking back, been raising money in the clean tech environment since 2008. And let me tell you there it's nothing like it used to be. So that certainly it's not only personally gratifying for Malta in the sense that, you know, yes, we raised quite a lot of money.
It's, it's really a hopeful statement about our entire industry and our sector and how durable, I think, I think this is going to be as a transition. So, you know, and that feels good to wake up every day thinking, you know, gosh, look at these tea leaves and boy, doesn't it look like a promising world. So that's the best part.
The worst part of raising capital, even in this positive environment is that, of course, you know, it takes a huge amount of time. And all the time that it takes one, you know, as a CEO, you're conscious of the fact that you're not doing your day job. Like every minute that you're spending raising capital is at the expense of a minute that you could have been spending, you know, with your team on strategy, helping unclog their roadblocks, everything that you have to do on a day in day out basis to make sure that the company is doing as well as it could be. And so that's really the dual challenge. That's true, irrespective of the funding environment, hopefully in a good capital market, you do that less. But that, that is the fundamental tension, which is that capital raising can become the focus of the company. And the challenge always is to restrict it to a small of a group as possible with as little an interruption to the day-to-day business of the company.
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| EMILY | Speaking of other challenges, you've mentioned that the startup creation process at X is really rigorous that they test concepts to failure. I think there's a stat that something like 95% of projects that X tests do not come to fruition. What made Malta succeed, and how do you think about that testing process as it relates to the company now?
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| RAMYA | Yeah, so, I think there's sort of two different components of that testing, right? One is purely technical and the other one is purely commercial. And to some extent, the technical robustness of an idea, a design is really the strength of the person who had that idea. Now of course, ideas can be bettered, the scoping of the particular components of the design, the engineering, et cetera.
And the brilliance of Malta was that there wasn't a lot of R ever in the design. The other part of that rigorous testing really has to do with the product market fit and the willingness to pay essentially the commercial environment in which you're going to launch this product because certainly the idea that you're just going to build a great widget and people are going to buy it because it's great is one that is faulty. And so that I think has a lot more to do with almost luck than anything else, right. The original idea for Malta had been around for quite a while before 2018, but I don't think it was really until the 2017, 2018 point where it became obvious from an economic and commercial standpoint, that we were really on the cusp of a transition and that there was going to be great pull from the kinds of customers that a storage company would need, utilities, IPPs, corporate customers, who were in search of a solution. To increasing mandates to get 24/7 renewables, increasing renewables, penetration, curtailment, as well as just simply the high cost of coal, a remarkable fact that we are all, we all have, the blessing of dealing with today is that renewables are the cheapest form of generation.
You know, essentially the price of renewable generation as, as I'm toting to zero, that wasn't true. Five years ago, it wasn't true. 10 years ago. And so I think what it points to is absolutely that the, the idea of diligence and testing is really important. And the rigorousness of that analysis is really important, but there's a part of it that really has to be a taker about the market environment, which is not in the control of anybody doing the testing.
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| EMILY | When you think about taking Malta to market and imagining a Malta plant on the ground somewhere, if I was standing in front of it, what would I see? And what would, what would the scale be?
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| RAMYA | The best words I've ever heard, to describe something like that is, it would be ugly beautiful. It would be just ugly, beautiful 10 acres, around the same energy density as lithium ion.
It looks, if you want to imagine it this way, it looks a little bit like a traditional fossil power plant where there's, you know, big rotating equipment and heat exchangers, et cetera. And a little bit of a chemical plant because you've got the big storage tanks with molten, salt and coolant. So it looks like a, you know, just visually it looks like a cross between a traditional power plant and a chemical plant.
As I said, about 10 acres, you know, pumps, pipes, valves, et cetera, heavy, heavy, industrial equipment. Very similar to pumped hydro actually, and very similar to, for example, flow batteries, which is that it's really easy to extend the duration. So all you have to do to go from 10 hours to 14 hours to 20 hours to 25 hours is to add more salt and add more coolant and build a bigger tank.
So, it's easy from a design perspective, it's also the cheapest part of the system. So what we expect is that as the energy transition gets to be more significant and there's increased renewables penetration, well beyond where we are today, the need for duration is going to extend. So right now, kind of in markets, in a variety of places we're starting to see solicitations for 10 hours and our starting product is 10 hours. However, we fully expect that within a few years, we're going to start to see those same solicitations from those kinds of customers really start benchmarking a 16, 18, 20 hour duration. And for us, for our technology, that's not really a complicated engineering exercise to accommodate that change.
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| EMILY | So 10 hours of storage to start, and then a hundred megawatt scale for these plants. Is that right?
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| RAMYA | Yup. A hundred megawatts is sort of our, our base size building blocks. So big industrial power plant size is what you're imagining.
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| EMILY | I know Malta recently announced that you are working with Duke Energy to explore converting retired coal plants into long duration storage plants using Malta's technology. How would this work? What would it look like?
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| RAMYA | So this issue of coal plant shutdowns is resonant globally. In some cases it's driven by policy mandates. Germany, for example, has announced that it will be exiting coal by 2038. And in other places it's just the inexorable logic of the economic condition, right. Coal is expensive relative to. wind and solar, which are clearing auctions. As I said, at the price of the SM toting towards zero, right, clearing auctions are really, really low prices. And so in that context, we're seeing everywhere globally that coal plants are shutting down. And one of the reasons that that is a powerful force politically is because there's a lot of dislocation in that context.
And so from my perspective, one of the things I'm most excited about the work that we're doing with Duke is the opportunity to really characterize, in reality, not just in words, in reality, the energy transition as being a fair transition, a people-centered transition by taking advantage of the opportunity to use a site that had been used for a coal plant and to put a Malta system there.
Remember I said, when you look at it, it's going to look very much like a traditional fossil plant and employ all the same people in terms of the jobs thereby limiting, maybe eliminating the job loss that comes along with this dislocation, right? Like every change there are winners and losers and those of us involved in the energy transition have to not forget that the losers deserve our attention as well, the losers of this game, of this economic transition. We are super excited at the possibility that Malta represents a third door in any potential conflict between labor and green. Our idea is that it doesn't need to be a conflict and that the transition can be people-centered.
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| EMILY | What was your single worst day at Malta?
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| RAMYA | Oh, that's an interesting question. I was going to say my, I can clearly identify my single worst day as a CEO and an entrepreneur, and it was at my previous company. And I remember being with one of my co-founders and we were just sitting and refreshing our bank account online as though money was going to magically appear, you know, and looking at each other, saying, how are we going to make the next payroll?
I remember the weight of that day, very, very clearly. I have to say that at Malta I've had no days like that, which is not to say that every day has been perfect, but I've had no days with the weight of that responsibility.
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| EMILY | How has your leadership style changed as the company has grown?
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| RAMYA | That's a very interesting question and one that, you know, to be honest, I'm not sure I have the best perspective on. In some ways in the most literal of ways, you know, of course, you have less time, you have, less ability to know every person, the way, you know, those first five people that walk in the door and you do everything with them and everybody works on everything. And it turns into a really communitarian way of approaching company development, the natural Genesis of a company as it gets old, as it gets bigger, older. And we're now close to 35 people, is that's no longer possible or desirable. It wouldn't be really reasonable for all 35 of us to work on the same things all day, every day.
So there's sort of some natural ebb and flow about the way that leadership works, but I would say that also as we've refined our vision, I've just gotten more comfortable and confident about the fact that I really believe in our path.
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| EMILY | What lesson has taken you the longest to learn?
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| RAMYA | I think having the sense to believe my first instinct or to believe that first judgment. And I still find myself questioning my own thoughts, disbelieving my own conclusions, until I go through a process and sort of end up right where I started. And then I tell myself, gosh, like next time I'm not going to do that. And then I find myself doing it again.
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| EMILY | Well, on a personal front, you are both a partner to your husband, you are a parent to your two teenage daughters. What has it been like being a partner, a parent, and a CEO at the same time?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | At its most essential level, what I will say is that it's been fantastic. And I think that it's been fantastic if I can be so presumptuous for my husband and my kids to have a wife and a mother who loves what she does, who gets up every day, most days, you know, feeling a deep sense of mission and feeling really embedded and fundamentally bought in to my own sense of meaning in the world. And that's a really important consideration-that's sort of the philosophical point. The very kind of day-to-day point is. Gosh, you know, there, there are good days and bad days and days where I, you know, I make a great dinner and days I don't and days where I'm a good and listening and intuitive partner and days where I'm sure I'm a little more self-involved than I should be. And all of that is part of the deal.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Where are you in Malta today and where will you be in five years?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | So we're still a young company. We're just about two and a half years old. And we've just gone through a major inflection point in closing our last round of financing. And really now focusing, as I said, all our energies on that first deployment, which is really execution mode, as opposed to kind of visioning thinking, you know, I say often at the company, you know, we've done a lot of thinking and now we're doing.
And that's an inflection point for a company. And so that's where we are today, where we're getting our legs under us and we're starting to run. Our ambition really across the board is a global place at the table and the energy transition that we see happening everywhere. And that ambition is enormous.
And we think that, we think it's a big tent. Like there there's a lot of technology there's space for a lot of technologies. But we want, Malta to play a very important role in providing for the segment that we are appropriate for, be a really important part of the tools in the toolkit.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | I couldn't agree more and it's a perfect segway into our high voltage round. These are quick questions, quick answers, quick meaning a couple words, 5 to 10 seconds. The first question is Ramya, if you were going to be an animal, what animal would you be and why?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | That's easy an elephant.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Oh, me too!
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Oh, really? There has never been a time in my life that I have not admired elephants, their loyalty, their intelligence, their communitarian nature. That's easy.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Totally. A hundred percent agreed. What inspires you?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | These days? I sort of am inspired every day when I open the news Roundup and I see all kinds of news, like, you know, the news from the Exxon shareholders meeting, the news from the Dutch court, the news of auctions clearing at $10 for renewable power.
So I mean, these days to be completely honest and I hope it doesn't come off as trite, I find every day inspiring just by reading the news.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Agreed. If you had to start a new career tomorrow, what would it be
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | I'm actually one of those people who I think could be interested in a lot of things. And so, although I've loved my journey in energy, and I really feel passionate about climate change, honestly, I think I could feel as passionate about anything that I felt was intrinsically meaningful.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Other than yourself to whom do you attribute your success?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | My parents, for sure. My husband who patiently puts up with all my failings, and the variety of people who I've worked with who've contributed to my success.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | When have you failed?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | In a fundamental sense, I mean, if you were to think about what we define as failure every day, but I don't think any of those have been failures in the sense that they have prevented me from moving on and moving up and ultimately doing something better.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | What is the best investment you've ever made?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Believing in the friends who persuaded me to take that jump from investment banking.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Is there something that you thought was true that you no longer believe?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | I think when I was younger and, specifically coming from Asia and the Asian kind of background, I used to believe that being booksmart was kind of the be all and the end all of, you know, studying hard, getting good grades, et cetera. And the older I've gotten, the more I realized that capability, competence, intelligence, smarts, experience comes in so many different varieties.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | When are you your best self?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | In the morning.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | I'm also a morning person.
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Every morning.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | What is your worst trait?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | In some ways that questioning of myself that I described earlier, not always understanding that all reactions don't need to be questioned to the nth degree.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Female education, education of girls.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | If there was just one person who was going to listen to this podcast, who would you want it to be?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | My dad.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | When was the last time you were scared?
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | I think probably most meaningfully the last time I started a capital raise, which was just last year, late, last year, not understanding in the middle of COVID, what that was going to do to the prospects for the company and whether capital markets were going to be completely frozen in the face of something we had no understanding of the dimensions of.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | What is your best quality.
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Optimism.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Finish these sentences for me. Companies fail because...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Fundamentally, because there's a mismatch between the conditions in the world as they are and what the people in the company think they should be.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | If you really knew me, you would know...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | That I'm very silly.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Success is...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Being able to say that you've believed in what you've done.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | If I could have done one thing differently, I would have...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Ensured that the stress that I felt on my worst days did not permeate outward into the company. Because as a CEO, you have an enormous amount of power over the unquantifiable feeling in the company.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | If the world knew me for one thing, it would be...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | For a relentless belief that we are going to change the energy dimension in the world.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | I'm most proud of...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Very classic answer, my kids.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Last question, to build a successful startup what it takes is...
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Endurance.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Speaking of endurance, you have completed this round of high-voltage. Ramya, thank you so much. I loved getting to know you better hearing your story, your journey, your leadership, I'm really grateful that you're in the world doing what you're doing.
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| ___________________ |
| RAMYA | Thank you. Likewise, Emily, it was just wonderful.
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| _________________ |
| EMILY | Ramya Swaminathan is the CEO of Malta. Join us for new stories each month of founders who are building our carbon-free future, their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs that are transforming our world.
I want to thank Google for their support of the show. Find out how Google is accelerating the deployment of next generation clean energy with its 24/7 carbon-free goal. Learn more by following the link in the show notes. Watt It Takes is produced by Powerhouse in partnership with Post Script Audio. Powerhouse's innovation firm partners with corporations to help them find and engage with cutting edge startups, tap into proprietary market insights and lead the next century of clean technology innovation. Our fund, Powerhouse Ventures backs founding teams, building innovative software to rapidly transform our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, that's powerhouse.fund. And follow us on Twitter @joinpowerhouse, and you can follow me @emilykirsch.
And at Powerhouse, we are hiring. If you want to help some of the biggest companies in the world build the future of energy and mobility, head over to powerhouse.fund/careers. We're looking for an industry powerhouse to join as the vice president of our innovation firm and someone who wants to accelerate their career in climate tech as our marketing and operations associate who will, among other things, work on this very podcast.
We'll also be posting a fall internship with our fund, Powerhouse Ventures in the coming weeks. Our executive producer is Stephen Lacey, our producers are Jamie Kaiser, Ry Storey-Fisher and Emma McDonagh. Sean Marquand mixed the episodes and composed our music. I'm Emily Kirsch. This is Watt It Takes.
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